Summary
An epigraph reads, "The mediator between brain and hands must be the heart!" We see a booming modern city, then many industrial wheels and mechanisms turning rapidly as a clock hits 12. Steam blows out of a smokestack and we see a number of workers lined up as a gate opens to reveal yet more workers. The workers march in unison off to work, all wearing matching uniforms. The workers' heads are hung low and they board a large elevator as supertitles read, "Deep below the Earth's surface lay the worker's city." The elevator arrives in the workers' city, and the workers all file off and towards the buildings where they work.
The scene shifts to "the Club of the Sons," high above the city, where the upper classes live. We see this city, high above in the clouds. A group of men run in a race. A supertitle tells us, "Fathers, for whom every revolution of a machine wheel meant gold, had created for their sons the miracle of the Eternal Gardens." A group of women gathers in a beautiful garden as a man asks, "Which of you ladies shall today have the honor of entertaining Master Freder, Joh Fredersen's son?"
A woman bows and turns around, showing off her dress several times. Another woman volunteers and the man fixes her lipstick. When a young man, Freder, arrives, he runs through the garden pursued by one of the women who calls after them. They chase each other around an overflowing fountain, and he eventually catches her and begins to kiss her. As he does, however, the doors of a building nearby opens and a woman appears, surrounded by shabbily dressed children.
"Look! These are your brothers!" the woman says to the children, as the inhabitants of the Club of the Sons stare at the new arrivals. A number of guards walk up to the woman as Freder stares at her, clutching his heart. She ushers the children back inside, and as the doors close behind her, Freder follows towards the doors, and asks an older man who the woman is.
The older man tells him, and Freder looks around at all the nature surrounding them with a dramatic look on his face. He runs into the building, as a supertitle reads, "But this is what happened to Freder—son of Joh Fredersen, master of Metropolis—when he went in search of the girl:"
We see Freder down in the workers' city, staring up at the giant machinery in awe. He sees men working in complete unison, as smoke flairs out of various smokestacks and a man struggles to control a machine that seems to be malfunctioning. A thermometer in one of the machines escalates and escalates, until suddenly the machine is overtaken by smoke and workers fall from great heights, sprayed by a toxic smoke in the explosion.
As chaos breaks out, the machine opens in what appears to be a wide, menacing looking mouth, and a group of shirtless workers, all tied together, are pulled up the steps and into the smoke. Freder hallucinates that the machine is Moloch, a biblical figure to whom human sacrifices were fed, and watches in horror as the hallucination ends, and the workers go immediately back to business as usual. He then runs to his driver and tells him to take him to "the new Tower of Babel," to talk to his father.
We then see Joh Fredersen in his office looking at numbers, while a group of men sit around a table nearby working. He paces, clearly tense about the market, when suddenly Freder comes rushing into his office. The men in his office look up for a second, but he motions for them to continue working, ignoring Freder's presence.
One of Fredersen's assistants looks anxious and walks over to Freder, who falls into his arms and tells him what he saw in the workers' city. Freder then goes to his father and tells him what happened, which causes Fredersen to scold his assistant, Josaphat, for not telling him about the explosion himself. He dismisses Josaphat to go learn more about it, then talks with his son.
Fredersen tries to calm his son down, but Freder is stricken by what he saw, appalled at the conditions in the workers' city. Suddenly, Fredersen asks Freder what he was doing down there in the first place, and Freder replies, "I wanted to look into the faces of the people whose little children are my brothers, my sisters..." Fredersen begins to walk away, but Freder feels conflicted about his privileged position up above ground.
We see various views of the giant city as Freder asks, "...And where are the people, father, whose hands built your city?" Fredersen replies, "Where they belong." Freder is taken aback by his father's callousness and touches his temples in despair, before musing, "What if one day those in the depths rise up against you?"
Fredersen looks at his son as a buzzer goes off on his desk. The business magnate goes and closes the curtains as Josaphat comes back in and announces the entrance of the foreman of the Heart Machine with an important message. The foreman enters and puts two drawn sets of directions on the desk in front of Fredersen, telling him that they were found "in the pockets of two men involved in today's accident at the Machine."
Fredersen scolds Josaphat for the fact that these plans had to be brought by the foreman and not Josaphat, before firing Josaphat on the spot. Freder looks distressed as Josaphat leaves the room and bemoans the fact that the consequence of being fired is going into the depths. Suddenly, Freder runs from the office.
Analysis
The film has a highly original and specific style from the beginning. True to the title, the film opens with a shot of a booming metropolis, before we see a number of wheels and other industrial mechanisms churning. The image then shifts to a large group of workers filing in large clumps into a factory. This imagery shows us that in the world of the film, the bodies of the working class are equivalent to cogs or wheels in a machine, moving in unison and serving a highly practical purpose for a larger industrial organization.
In the world of the film, the hierarchies of class and position within society are turned into literal spatial realities. The upper classes live in high rises looking down on the world beneath, while the working classes literally have their own city—"the workers' city"—deep below the Earth's crust, underground. The difference in social position also translates to access to opportunity, as those who live in "the Club of Sons" have access to libraries, theater, and institutions of higher learning, while the workers' city is only for work.
Soon enough we are introduced to the main players in the film, Freder, the son of the ruler of Metropolis, and a young schoolteacher from the city of workers, Maria. Maria has led her schoolchildren into the beautiful garden of the upper levels, in hopes of showing the children that there are possibilities that exist beyond the drudgery of the lower level. Freder is immediately smitten, as represented by his dramatic expressions. Thus begins a classic tale of star-crossed lovers, doomed by their opposing stations.
In spite of its having been made in 1927, the film is striking to the contemporary viewer in much the way it must have been to audiences in the 20s. The visual vocabulary is markedly singular, at once unusual and grand, incorporating visual elements that look distinctly 1920s with more futuristic elements. This confluence between the historical and the imagined future is what continues to fascinate viewers who tout the film as the first science fiction film of all time. Fritz Lang's future is an art deco one, where bloomers and flapper haircuts converge with spacey sky-high gardens.
Complicating life in this hierarchical city is the fact that the son of the leader of Metropolis has ambivalence about how it is being run. After seeing the conditions in the workers' city, Freder is deeply distressed about the fact that while he has the privilege of living high up in the city, there are many who do not. This sense of guilt over his own privilege is only further compounded by his desire for the beautiful Maria, the woman from the workers' city who ventured into the higher level and has thus subverted the class hierarchy of their world. In an instant, Freder finds himself both in love and indignant, drawn to a passionate critique of the system his father upholds.
